Hell freezes over again ...

If you were ask me to list twenty things I was pretty sure I would never hear, former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman praising a Conservative Prime Mininster, even a female one, would probably have been on the list.

Well, I would have been wrong.

But yesterday on Radio 4 during a discussion  on the issue of sexual harrassment at Westminster Harriet Harman said of Theresa May

"I think she's done pretty well this week."

Hell has officially frozen over ...

Comments

Jim said…
Its an odd one this hell freezing over thing.

Yes, I know its an odd comment, but as a person with no real religious faith, I tend to picture somewhere like hell as Dante has it.

no great shakes there.

But you see the thing that always struck me is why is the first 3rd of the divine comedy called inferno? only little tiny bits of hell are ever on fire at any given time, and the worst bits of it are indeed frozen over.

its something I always found puzzling
12:19 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Agreed, and if there really is a hell I imagine it is far more likely to be like the depiction in C.S. Lewis's book "The Great Divorce" - a grey town, dull boring and wet - than the sort of lake of fire which was a relatively small part of the Inferno of Dante's imagination.

And as you rightly say, even in Dante's Hell the worst places are not those which are boiling hot but freezing cold.

I suppose "Hell freezes over" based on hell being hot is such a wonderful metaphor for something very unlikely that we cannot help using it, even though in Dante's Divine Comedy the deepest part of hell always was frozen over!

If you enjoyed reading Dante's inferno, incidentally, you might enjoy the brilliant rewrite by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, also called "Inferno" which retells the story of Dante's hell from the viewpoint of a modern science fiction writer.

There is a sequel called "Escape from Hell" which is entertaining but not quite so good.

Oh dear, that's a shame. In the process of checking a couple of facts for this reply I have just learned that Jerry Pournelle died this year.
11:01 pm
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